Map of the Fallen - Google Earth

Old-Salt

"During the US Memorial Day weekend we announced the release of a Google Earth file to honor servicemen and women who, since October 2001, had lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The file has been a personal project for Sean Askay who started the project as a graduate student in 2005 prior to joining the Google Earth Outreach team. Since then he has spent more personal time updating the visualizations and consulting with current and retired servicemen and women, as well as veterans' organizations in the United States. He also reached out to many families of the fallen and Warrant Officer Frank McVey, a retired member of the UK's Royal Air Force (and avid Google Earth user), for guidance and help with this project.

The Map of the Fallen collection uses over 24,000 placemarks, 6,000 folders, 2,500 screen overlays, and line arcs with over 250,000 vertices, all to create an immersive and compelling user experience. By making extensive use of Google Earth 5.0's new features, including iframes, CSS and JavaScript support in balloons and time-based navigation, you can now fly to a place and time. With a blend of navigation methods, people can look up information about servicemen and women alphabetically, by age, location or chronology. Notably, Sean was also able to develop algorithms for rendering parabolic arcs - that follow rhumb lines - to connect two points on the globe, an innovative technique used to powerful effect in this project. Read more about the project at Sean's web site."